Computer programs in the area of artificial intelligence and expert systems are well known. A book entitled The Fifth Generation by Edward Feigenbaum and Pamela McCorduc, Addison-Wesley 1983, and a book entitled Building Expert Systems by Frederick Hayes-Roth, Donald Waterman and Douglas Lenat, Addison-Wesley, 1984, give a good introduction to the state of the art in this area.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,648,044 (Hardy), U.S. Pat. No. 4,595,982 (Burt), and U.S. Pat. No. 4,644,479 (Bellows) are representative of recently issued patents in the area of expert systems.
There are a large number of commercially available programs in this area. Some of these programs are designed to run on large mainframe computers. Others are designed to run on relatively small personal computers. Computer programs which facilitate the development of expert systems are generally termed Expert System Shells. A program commercially available from the International Business Machines Corporation as program Number 5798-RWQ entitled "Expert Systems Development Environment" is an example of a Expert System Shell that is designed to run on large computers. A program entitled "GURU" marketed by Micro Data Base Systems Inc. is an example of an Expert Systems Shell that is designed to run on relatively small personal computers. A variety of such programs are commercially available.
Many of the commercially available Expert System Shells have editors which facilitate entering the data and rules necessary to create an expert system. The available editors generally fall into two broad categories.
First there are some Expert System Shells which use text editors to enter parameters data and rules. Many text editors are commercially available. For example, an editor called the "Personal Editor" is commercially available from IBM for use on Personal Computers. Many other text editors are also commercially available. A text editor is what is used to enter information into the previously referenced expert shell called "GURU".
The second type of editor generally used is represented by the editor in the previously referenced program called the "Expert System Development Environment". The editor used in this program has a series of panels which provide selections. However, the panels provided by the "Expert System Development Environment" program do not automatically lead the operator through a series of panels that request information required to define classes and nodes as does the present invention. The panels presented by editors such as the "Expert System Development Environment" provide the operator with a list of choices and the operator must choose the sequence of steps he wants to use in the definition process. With the present invention, the sequence necessary to define each particular class and node is automatically presented to the operator, thereby making the present invention exceptionally easy to learn and use.